ENERGY

BOOK TALK
BOOK TALK
Transforming U.S.-Latin American Relations
A REVIEW BY MICHAEL SHIFTER
Routledge Handbook of Latin
America and the World, edited
by Jorge Domínguez and Anna
Covarrubias (Routledge: Taylor
and Francis Group, 2014, 482
pages)
On December 17, 2014,
after U.S. President Barack
Obama and Cuban President
Raúl Castro simultaneously
announced the decision to
move towards normalizing
bilateral relations—after
more than half a century
of estrangement—there
was little backlash. Cubans
cheered, and even in Miami’s
traditionally hardline Cuban
American community, criticism
was muted. A counterproductive
policy, linked to
the Cold War and frozen in
time, had at last been adapted
to the 21st century.
That development, which
secured Obama’s legacy in
Latin America and took
away virtually the only U.S.
policy stand unifying the
entire region against it, came
too late to be included in
this excellent and impressively
wide-ranging volume
co-edited by Jorge Domínguez
of Harvard University
and Anna Covarrubias of El
Colegio de Mexico. The book
systematically reviews the
dramatic changes that have
taken place since the Cold
War to the present, not only
in inter-American affairs but
especially in Latin America’s
global relations. Until now,
U.S.-Cuba policy had been an
outlier, notably out of sync
with most of Washington’s
other approaches towards the
region.
Domínguez and Covarrubias
have assembled a
diverse and first-rate group
of analysts and scholars to
illuminate in particular the
processes that have rendered
Latin America’s relationship
with the rest of the world
barely recognizable from the
1980s. The volume is soundly
conceived, conceptually
coherent and well-organized.
It begins with a fine
overview chapter by Abraham
Lowenthal and Hannah
Baron highlighting the
region’s transformations, followed
by sections focused on
varied theoretical approaches,
examinations of five Latin
American countries’ foreign
policies, the role of extraregional
actors, the progress—and
limits—of integration
and multilateral efforts,
and thematic studies most
germane to Latin America’s
international relations. There
is a lot to track and digest.
Although some overlap and
unevenness in quality are
inevitable—the sheer scope of
the material covered results
in some unwieldiness—the
chapters are generally of very
high caliber. Each makes a
distinct and valuable contribution
to interpreting an
enormously complex and constantly
evolving landscape.
The chapters make clear that
Latin America’s engagement
with the world did not begin
with the end of the Cold
War—in fact, the region’s
global links were arguably
stronger before that fierce
ideological battle emerged—
but there is little question
that globalization in recent
decades has accelerated such
a process. In the latter part of
the 20th century, the United
States was the predominant
external actor involved in the
region. Vast asymmetries in
power defined a complicated
and ambivalent relationship,
often marked by both cooperation
and conflict. Such
power differentials naturally
gave rise both to a paternalistic
attitude in the United
States and to suspicions and
resentments against the
United States in many parts
of Latin America. For Washington
during that period,
anti-communism trumped
all other interests. The Cold
War years left a lot of baggage
that, as a number of the chapters
argue, manifests itself to
this day. There are signs that
the shift in U.S.-Cuba policy
has begun to mitigate some of
the associated costs.
Several chapters devote
attention to what Covarrubias
and Domínguez call, in their
superb introduction, “the
second wave of regionalism
(that) took place in the late
1980s and early 1990s.” They
aptly characterize the 1990s
as the “liberal decade,” when
it appeared to many observers
that, with the end of the
Cold War and the move from
authoritarian to democratic
rule, Latin America was
converging on three fundamental
notions: democratic
politics, market economics,
and productive cooperation
with the United States.
The heightened promise
of multilateralism in the
hemisphere (which ultimately
proved to be elusive) is amply
documented. Chapters on the
Organization of American
States by Thomas Legler,
trade and economic integration
by Antoni Estevadordal,
Paolo Giordano and Barbara
Ramos, and North America
by Robert Pastor (to whom
the volume is dedicated)
provide an analysis of this
phase. Today there is a
greater measure of realism on
these questions. Expectations
have been considerably scaled
back.
New global forces and
pressures—coupled with Al
Qaeda attacks on New York
and Washington, D.C., on
September 11, 2001—helped
turn the page on that brief
interregnum of unity and
hemispheric cooperation
and ushered in what Estevadordal,
Giordano and
Ramos identify as a “third
wave of regionalism” starting
around 2003. In some
respects, the most recent
period has been paradoxical.
On the one hand, as Natalia
Saltalamacchia documents in
her chapter, regional groupings
have proliferated over
the past decade—some, like
the Bolivarian Alliance for
Latin America (ALBA), with
a decidedly anti-U.S. cast,
and others, like the Union
for South American Nations
(UNASUR) and the Community
of Latin American and
Caribbean Nations (CELAC),
following a tradition dating
from Simon Bolívar that
expresses Latin American
solidarity and independence.
On the other hand, however,
if one carefully examines policy
positions, Latin America
has arguably never been more
variegated and fragmented,
as each government pursues
its separate national agenda.
This volume helps resolve
the apparent contradiction
between heightened regionalism
and unprecedented
disunity. Several chapters,
especially one by Arturo
Santa-Cruz, emphasize
the importance of Latin
America’s identity, reflected
in a long history of shared
history and culture. In this
sense, markedly divergent
national strategies on a range
of issues—from trade to basic
notions of governance—are
fully compatible with a
desire to join together at the
regional level, to project and
assert greater confidence on
the global stage.
In the 2000s, with the
United States suffering
setbacks in its Iraq misadventure
and the economic
and financial crises, Latin
America had a larger space
to pursue a more independent
political and economic
course. This is particularly
true of/in South America, as
Mexico and Central American
remained profoundly connected
to the United States. A
confluence of factors account
for the region’s opportunity to
exercise greater “autonomy,”
a construct that runs through
the volume and gets detailed
treatment in theoretical chapters
by Roberto Russell and
Juan Gabriel Tokatlian and
another by Arlene Tickner.
No country exemplifies such a
shift in its regional and global
profile since 2003 (when Lula
became president) as much
as Brazil, a story well told in
the chapter by Monica Hirst
and Maria Regina Soares de
Lima. During this period,
moreover, the region (with
few exceptions) sustained
solid growth rates and managed
to reduce poverty, even
inequality, and expand its
middle class.
To be sure, one of the most
significant developments in
Latin America of the past
decade has been the greater
presence and deeper engagement
of extra-hemispheric
actors, most particularly
China on the economic front.
China’s major economic role
in the region is, not surprisingly,
mentioned in virtually
every chapter in the volume.
In a separate chapter, Margaret
Myers offers a comprehensive
analysis of China’s
evolving engagement in Latin
America, chiefly through
trade, but also financing and,
increasingly, investments in
infrastructure. Despite its
economic slowdown, China
remains a formidable economic
player in many of the
region’s countries, and there
is no sign that its strategy
will become less aggressive
or diminish in coming years.
The volume also contains
solid chapters on Latin American
relations with Europe
and another with Japan. Others
could have been included
on the region’s relations with
India and South Korea, which
were not discussed in this
otherwise complete volume.
Among the book’s many
merits is an emphasis on the
complex interplay among
domestic political factors for
foreign policies and global
relations. Andrés Malamud’s
chapter on presidential
decision-making in Latin
American foreign policy is
particularly instructive. In
another chapter, Russell and
Tokatlian argue that during
the Kirchner era foreign
policy was significantly
shaped—more so than in
other periods—by internal
domestic politics. All of the
authors understand that to
explain foreign policies one
has to examine the dynamics
of national politics.
As a measure of the
volume’s scope, the analysis
goes beyond governmental
relations and encompasses
globalization processes
originating in the region,
including civil society groups
and movements and expanding
numbers of multilatinas,
Latin American businesses
that operate worldwide. In
light of the dynamic quality
of global interactions today,
the book might have even
gone a bit deeper, probing the
implications of social media
and accelerating people-topeople
connections. Indeed,
the volume demonstrates that
the region has offered a great
deal to the rest of the world.
Kathryn Sikkink argues
persuasively that much of the
work on human rights that
emerged in Latin America
has been of immense value
and utility to the same cause
in other parts of the world.
And in another chapter on
human rights, Peruvian
jurist Diego Garcia-Sayan
maintains—somewhat at
odds with prevailing assumptions—that
despite the
relentless attacks against the
inter-American system in
recent years, the impact of
rulings by the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights has,
on balance, been positive and
quite considerable.
Although history shows
that Latin America’s global
engagement does not necessarily
march forward in linear
fashion, there is reason to
believe that the tendencies
witnessed, particularly in
recent decades, towards the
region’s deeper and more
varied relations with the rest
of the world, will continue.
This is even so for the United
States which for all the talk
of its declining influence,
remains a key player in Latin
America. Mark Williams
offers useful ideas how it
can take better advantage
of opportunities to become
more productively involved.
As Nicola Philips reminds us
in her compelling chapter, the
volume comes out precisely at
a moment when fundamental
power shifts are taking place
throughout the world and
there is tremendous flux and
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